Winter Reality

For People With Acute Environmental Reactivity

If your local climate is wintry, you well know the relief that a snug, warm home offers against the sometimes brutal cold outside. Whether that is because your home is well-insulated, well-heated, or has cheery hot-spots does not particularly matter. What matters is that your personal space is independent of the vicissitudes of the outdoors. Winter, then, is no big deal. It is just a prolonged low spot in the yearly calendar as one comfortably awaits the lengthening of days and warming of Spring.

For people who have environmental health challenges, their Winter story is often more nuanced and less cheery. Here, in our all-electric MA home, accommodating electrical sensitivity for health means that we do not run the house electricity at night. Even in Winter. As shown above, my office desk was a bracing 46.8 degrees F last week. This is far from the lowest indoor reading this season and I do not look forward to February or any time the weather predictions involve The Polar Vortex or an Arctic air mass visiting for a while. ‘No electricity’ means no heat for us.

We have no — and desire no — combustion heat in this home, neither a fireplace nor a wood stove. Air quality issues as well as fire hazard concern matter more to us than the inconvenience of getting the occasional wind chill when walking too quickly in the home.

Ventilation of the air is important, especially as such newly built homes are encouraged to ‘build tight, ventilate right’. Thus we need to ventilate the carbon dioxide and other fug by means of open windows, even in Winter, monitoring CO2 levels throughout the day. We usually manage to run the ductless mini-splits (the only source of home heat) for about 4 hours per day, unless we are expecting visitors who would prefer less hardship than we endure.

The mini-splits emit airborne low frequencies EMFs directly into the EHS¹ sanctuary, and while the mini-splits operate, Sonia needs to be ensconced into a small den of RF-protective fabrics to tolerate the continued irritation of those EMFs. As shown above, the vertical green fabric is Staticot and the overhead fabric is doubled-up Ex-Static, both available from LessEMF.com. It is unpleasant to be thus penned in along with what irritable DE makes it through the cloths, so turning off the heat is a well-anticipated event of each day.

We gift each other thermal clothing and encourage their indoor use. Dressing in layers, including wearing a scarf and hat indoors, is the norm here during the Winter. We have more than 6 hot water bottles in use daily. These are generously deployed so as to keep each individual warm if they are seated. At night, the bed is warmed with a hot water bottle or two.

Sonia has a better relationship with cold than I do. She is perfectly content to swim outdoors in October (with a neoprene shortie). Her coping strategy is to have a large box of scrap cashmere/alpaca sweaters and hot water bottles (and a number of large EHS-supportive crystal spheres — a future post will describe such) into which her bare feet are nestled. Then, as many as 5 layers of flax linen clothing, since she sits near the open ventilation window.

So goes the Winter at our house, a battle every day to assemble and disassemble the RF-protective den, manipulate the windows to keep the fug to a dull roar, adjust the curtains to allow the day’s sunshine to warm us through the Southern windows and close them promptly to hold the temps steady through the dark hours. And hot water bottles, galore².

I did not relate this anecdote to elicit readers’ sympathy, but to highlight how having environmental sensitivities may have ripple effects that do affect the fundamental quality of life. The fact is that this sensitivity arose due to over-exposure to man-made EMFs and so might have been preventable had we exercised prudent caution back when health was taken for granted.

Instead, I write this post to express how thankful I am that we have found the various alternative modalities that allow us to have some semblance of normalcy and consequent good health. I am aware of many environmentally challenged people whose morning temperatures are near ambient as they are sleeping in a tent or a shed (because their apartment is too injurious) or sleeping in their car (they cannot find safe housing), or are having trouble breathing because of their neighbors’ exhaust fumes from oil furnaces and wood stoves. Others have no running water because the local municipality water company refuses to accommodate their need for a non-broadcasting usage meter or are effectively homeless because an injurious cell tower was plopped into their neighborhood and their health collapsed.

The number of sensitivity-driven refugees continues to rise, likely faster than linearly, though we can only infer that since those in authority do not care to keep track of this statistic. Pell-mell technological, chemical and industrial Progress are destroying our health and the ecosystem and it seems nothing short of a societal collapse will garner adequate public attention. The writing has been on the wall for decades and there will be no cavalry rescue possible. Rome burns while Nero fiddles around. And the children are harshly radiated in every classroom.

I should wish all a happy 2025, though I am hardly a Pollyanna even at the best of times (and temperatures). May you all keep on truckin’ through 2025 and beyond.

1. Electro-Hypersensitivity (EHS), recently renamed to EMR-S (Electromagnetic Radiation Syndrome).

2. The engaged reader might wonder how we fill hot water bottles even as we have the entire house grid power turned off for 14+ hours per day. We employ a Jackery 2000 power station, which has enough oomph to make dozens of hot water bottles and cups of tea until it needs to be recharged. This will be documented in a future post.